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5 Themes In Pitbull’s Music That Deserve More Attention

Pitbull is one of the most identifiable men in pop music today, and nearly every reason for that is usually considered “bad.” Everyone is aware of Pitbull’s contributions to the world – his short, incomprehensible verses, his repeated “Dales!” and “Mr. Worldwide’s!,” and his seemingly random transitions from English to Spanish and vice versa. But all of these are surface-level, mainstream bullshit. If you want to be a true music hipster, you need to go a little deeper with the work of Mr. Worldwide. Luckily, my knowledge of Pitbull is baffling in its extensiveness and I’m fully prepared to train you in all things Mr. 305.

Let learn! Dale!

Also, on a side note, consider this my sayonara to writing about Pitbull. I’vewritten a hell of alot about him, and with this list, I’m going to retire the subject for a while. You’ve been good to me, Pitbull. I’ll see you again one day.

Voli Can Make Women Do Anything You want.

Voli is a brand of light vodka that, for lack of a better description, tastes horrendous. If you were trapped on the side of a mountain and had finished all the pee you could drink to survive, you would sip Voli, but only with the hopes of soon creating more drinkable pee that might also wash the taste of Voli out of your mouth. I bought some in December 2012, a bottle which I soon discovered had expired back in September 2011. The amount that no one wanted it was astounding. I guess you could try to give it away at that point, but that would be too close to the Tuskegee Experiment.

In music videos though, Voli is the magical elixir that makes women realize that they do, in fact, lack any sort of inhibition. It appears in music videos and numerous lyrics, as sort of a deus ex machina for sex with Pitbull. According the official Voli website, it appears in five of his videos, but it seems that they’ve kept up with this number as well as they kept up with the amount of drinkable bottles on their store shelves, because I discovered a few more. For example, it makes a cameo in the video for “Confesion,” which features Sensato, a spry Latin rapper who is sort of the Robin to Pitbull’s Mr. Gotham City.

In it, Pitbull is confessing his sins to a scantily dressed nun. Most of these sins include just talking about Latin women that Pitbull finds attractive, with lines like “Sofia Vergara, she’s hot, she’s hot, and I met her in Miami (305!)/Only bad thing is, she’s already a part of a Modern Family! (Dayumm!)” Now, the dirty nun is a staple of erotic fantasies, but the lady in “Confesion,” despite not being up to the usual standards of a nunnery’s dress code, is trying to keep her composure.

Prayer won’t save you from the 305.

She can barely withstand this rapper’s inability to effectively craft puns about actresses. You root for her here. This nun is the closest thing we have to a relatable figure in the video and looking confused and politely smiling is what most people would do if Pitbull confronted them at work to talk about Eva Mendes. But she breaks, and in order to ease the guilt of tearing down the wall and ripping into Pitbull’s pants, she takes out a bottle of Voli.

Genesis.

Well, she doesn’t really “take it out” of anywhere. Now that the story has called for the nun to make a terrible, terrible decision, the Voli just appears there, next to a glass full of ice that must be available in all rap video confessionals. She drinks it down in a gulp that exceeds anything that I was able to do with this poor man’s horse urine. But then again, I’m not this nun. If Pitbull was trying to get into my pants, I would totally be fine with drinking as much Voli as it takes to black out the entire hallway of women who auditioned for “Flirtatious, Desperately Impulsive Nun.”

Pitbull Hates Social Media.

Pitbull’s social media presence is questionable. He manages to keep fans up to date on concerts and events that he’s promoting but he always manages to either A) juxtapose a famous person’s inspirational quote with an unrelated picture of himself or B) not understand how reading changes the pronunciation of his catchphrase “Dale’!” Pitbull, in every tweet and Facebook status, writes it out as “Daleeeeeeee!”, making it sound less like a catchphrase and more like he’s falling into a mine shaft.

Not one of the meaningful ones, but definitely the saddest one.

Pitbull’s use of social media exploded right after he released an album that featured two songs where he talked about disliking it. His latest full album was Global Warming, and both the first and last tracks have lines that would lead you to believe that Pitbull has a stance against, as stated in the first of these, the aptly titled “Global Warming,” “…Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.” I don’t know when Pitbull’s Instagram was created, but Pitbull was using the first two for sure when that song came out.

This is the face of a man that loves computers.

Pitbull’s next false statement comes in “I’m Off That.” Now, I take everything Pitbull says in “I’m Off That” with a grain of salt. He goes from the utterly ridiculous “Skateboarding? I’m off that!” to the more politically charged “Communism? I’m off that!” And if you predicted that 90% of the things that Pitbull rhymes “I’m off that!” with is “I’m off that!”, well, don’t quit your day job, wizard.

He shows his distaste of highly tinted photos right after he reveals his distaste of untrustworthy women. “She kiss and tell? I’m off that!/She Instagram? I’m off that?” This raises more questions than it answers. Who posted these unsavory Instagram photos of Pitbull? Instagram is designed to make sure that everyone involved has a limit to their visible hideousness, so they can’t be that bad. Or are you embarrassed to be seen with the girl who took the photo? Considering that Pitbull’s rhyme schemes are usually AAAAAAAA, he doesn’t have that much room to complain.

Pitbull’s Nonsensical Attempts At Humor

Rappers have strange senses of humor in the sense that they often lack senses of humor. They’re in a constant struggle for legitimacy, faced with a society that might one day say “That number of hos is pure hyperbole!” Pitbull breaks this trend by having an excellent sense of humor, a sense of humor so sharp and refined that it breaks the barriers of what we’d usually consider jokes.

For example, in the song “Something For The Djs,” Pitbull begins every verse with “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” Even if you’re not familiar with this tongue twister, you immediately know that it’s not of Pitbull’s creation, as there’s no mention of alcohol, women or Pitbull’s own nickname anywhere in it. It doesn’t fit the context of the song at all. It’s just something that Pitbull imagined would be funny and catchy when placed haphazardly in the beginning of the verse. To let you know that you should also think it’s funny, Pitbull laughs after both times he says it, which is more baffling than anything. I don’t know who the intended audience is for Pitbull’s nursery rhyme addition to a song about literally nothing in particular, but it goes over the audience’s head in the worst way possible.

Pitbull also has an odd way with metaphors since sometimes he doesn’t quite grasp what makes them work. In the song “Come N Go,” Pitbull raps “I aint talkin’ about cars/It’s automatic, I’ll pop your clutch.” Now, in order for that line to be understood totally, you would have to reverse it, so that the joke of Pitbull not actually talking about cars when he makes a vague metaphor about doing something calamitous with a vagina functions. Instead, Pitbull says that he’s not talking about cars, something we never accused him of doing, and follows it up with stating that some invisible subject is “automatic,” and hints that women need to hide their clutches before Pitbull performs a slash-and-burn campaign on them.

Pitbull’s most hilarious use of wordplay comes in “Party Ain’t Over,” where Pitbull says “I aint greedy, sharing is caring/Especially when it’s with Sharon and Karen/Especially when it’s with Sharon and Karen.” Now, it’s not all that clever, as it just relies on the listeners’ willingness to believe that two poor girls are associated with Pitbull enough for him to cram their names into a song. The best part about it is Pitbull’s insistence that he say it twice, as if he’s not sure that you heard it the first time. In this way, Pitbull becomes the annoying guy in a loud bar. “Especially when it’s with Sharon and Karen” he shouts over the noise of other people trying to ignore him. “ESPECIALLY WHEN IT’S WITH SHARON AND KAREN!”

Pitbull’s Surveillance/Secret Agent Fetish.

Pitbull loves to dress up in fancy suits that match whatever his surroundings are. Two prominent ones are “boat captain” and “secret agent”, which is a costume that has been developed into its own persona: Agent Armando Bond, or “Agent A.” Agent Armando Bond is the disguise that Pitbull turns to whenever he has to save the world, whether it be from girls not fucking him in hotel rooms, or aliens.

Dale or credit?

Agent A first shows up in “Hotel Room Service,” on the ID card that he subtly hands to the busty women at the front desk because “Hello! I’m a millionaire rapper and I’d like to pay for a room. Dale’!” just wouldn’t fly. This allows him to enter a secret sex hotel elevator which immediately turns on everything in its vicinity.

Canon.

More famously it shows up in the Men In Black III theme song, “Back In Time.” In this, Pitbull has had scenes shot that are supposed to be inserted seamlessly into the action of the movie. For example, Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith enter the Chinese Restaurant where Pitbull is pouring Voli for some girl. He gives them a head nod, to clue them in on an enemy alien’s arrival and then leaves. I don’t understand if Pitbull was supposed to be on a stakeout with this unnamed lady, or if he was just taking her out for one of those famous China Town Won Ton & Voli dinner specials, but regardless, he does alert Agent J and K and saves them from a sneak attack. Maybe we’ll see this in the Men In Black III Director’s Cut.

He also shows up on every single video screen in the MiB headquarters, and at one point, Will Smith takes the time to watch him rap about nothing related to the movie in the least, rather than doing his damn job. Lastly, he appears in the 1960’s party that Will goes to, rapping on stage, which I’m sure was a culture shock to everyone who attended expecting someone notable from their own time period.

Even when he’s not Agent A by name, he still digs the idea that he’s being spied on or is spying on someone. A few of Pitbull’s videos have a surveillance theme, assumedly because Pitbull really loves Rear Window. Pitbull even references Alfred Hitchcock in the song “I Know You Want Me” with the line “Now let’s make a movie like Alfred Hitchcock, haha!”, a line that would make some sense if Alfred Hitchcock solely directed films based around the shittiest vodka ever and asses.

00305

In “Get It Started,” Pitbull makes a living by rapping in rooms by himself and taking photos of various women, photos that he studies while he…goddammit…drinks Voli. One of the women who caught him spying on her uses this as enough music video logic to leave her crime boss husband for Armando. This leads to a climactic chase scene, but unlike other men famous for their effective spying, Pitbull doesn’t have that many techniques for evading capture other than breathing really close to the girl’s face and driving away. Luckily, his pursuers suck at their jobs too, and Pitbull is able to escape by simply turning right.

Women Might Not Desire Pitbull, But They Actually Totally Do.

A lot of women in Pitbull’s songs fall for Pitbull retroactively. They only start to dig him on the ride home from his concert. They may not like him very much in the moment, but they’re often aware that, subconsciously, it feels right to want to jump Pitbull’s bone.

Sometimes, women are also aware of another, unsuspecting woman’s latent attraction to Pitbull. In “International Love,” one woman offers up herself and her sister. Was the sister aware of this decision? Did she have any say in it? Probably not, but being abstinent around Pitbull is something that biology just doesn’t allow. From the way that Pitbull describes his travels, you’d think that, just after passing through the metal detector in a Brazilian airport, customs would then force you to take off all sharp objects again so that you could safely enter Pitbull’s urethra.

A more recent example would be in the song “Timber,” where Pitbull announces “She says she won’t/but I bet she will.” Is Pitbull a psychic? Does he have some kind of weird x-ray vision for the human soul? I don’t know much about psychology, but usually, when someone declines, that’s their final answer. And if the lyrics to this song are to be trusted then, at some point during the night that the convoluted narrative of “Timber” took place, Pitbull has already been turned down by this girl. That must be why Pitbull is so happy all of the time. He can go into any bar, get a drink thrown in his face, and still be able to say to himself “Yeah, she likes me. Dale’.”

Whenever I talk about Pitbull I always call him Feat. Pitbull because I haven’t heard music from him other than Back in Time that had him singing by himself. (And, trust me, I’d rather listen to Will Smith rap than PItbull sing.)